POLL: How Should Bowie Pay to Protect the Bay?
The city could face millions in costs to improve stormwater treatment facilities. But where would the money come from?
The Chesapeake Bay, as seen from Kent Island.
Christian Freymeyer
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The City of Bowie in the next five years may be facing unanticipated costs of $10 million to $40 million to improve its storm water treatment facilities. The change may come because of new federal regulations requiring many local governments to remove more pollutants from storm water runoff to better protect the Chesapeake Bay.
City officials, who describe these changes as an unfunded federal mandate, are pondering taxes or fees upon residents or borrowing money to raise the funds.
JustABill
12:32 pm on Saturday, December 3, 2011
What this article fails to mention is that the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund established and fully funded by the Ehrlich administration's "flush tax" had the money necessary to pay for these improvements and many others. Unfortunately, just like with the Transportation Trust Fund, the O'Malley administration and fellow democrats in the General Assembly raided (stole) from the CBRF to balance his insane spending. The above poll should have a fifth choice; make the democrats in Annapolis stop their reckless spending and return the stolen money to the CBRF and the TTF because Maryland tax payers are Taxed Enough Already!
michael mcardle
10:18 am on Sunday, December 4, 2011
As has been the case historically with the state's highway trust fund, to mention but one example, the prevailing political approach to these types of unanticipated cost and funding matters in Maryland has been the shell game JustaBill notes in his commentary.
We are seeing this philosophy play on yet another front as well. The University of Maryland athletic program is in such fiscal shambles the new President's commission is actually reccommending curtailment of 8 of the 27 varsity sports to cover a current $ 4 million dollar deficit, projected at present to grow to $ 8.7 million in 2013.
During my tenure at the Maryland Higher Education Commission as Assistant Secretary and Senior Adviser to the Secretary of Higher Education in Maryland (2004 to 2006), the Ehrlich Administration attempted to position the state to consider a new, contemporary cost and finance model for higher education based on a true cost managed funding approach. We obtained the first private grant funds - not tax funded - for an independent, best practice based study of the higher education model in Maryland. The state legislature reacted by forming their own committee to supplant, and thus bury the study.
An absence of political intellect and will in Annapolis to directly address both the inherent structural and ad hoc funding requirements we face in Maryland gives rise to issues such as the stormwater management mandate and the U of M athletic department meltdown.